Blaming God First
Why do children have to die?

[COMMENT: This is an excellent piece on "theodicy", the
attempt to reconcile our own sense of justice, which is presumably implanted by
God, with what we see to be the behavior of God. It is all about the
problem of pain in a world created by an omniscient, omnipotent, all
loving God. I do not agree with everything Novak says, but he does a
superb job.

What are we to say about a human condition
in which "Nature red in tooth and claw" rears up on its massive
hindquarters, and hurls a 30-foot wall of water against the lowlands of
eleven of the poorest and most populous nations on earth, including some
playgrounds of the rich of Europe and America, and crushes, chokes, and
twists away the lives of going past 150,000 human beings?

"Nature" is not the way the Greens picture it. Nature batters human
beings. Nature has annihilated tens of thousands of other species, why
not the human species?

Most of the public voices in our enlightened age have gotten away
with the indefensible drivel of liberal sentimentalism, chattering as if
all intelligent people are atheists, whose god is a benevolent,
nurturing, sheltering Mother Nature. Recently, I was debating on radio a
Dutch member of the European parliament, who described herself on air as
"an atheist who has values." She then described her values as "caring
about this Earth and protecting it, and passing it on to my children."

I respect and admire her choice. At that moment, though, she was
probably not thinking about this murderous tsunami and other natural
furies, such as the raging seas that would overpower Holland if the
extensive, huge dikes did not prevent it. Nor about diseases that for
millennia kept the primitive human population on earth pitifully low.

How cruel a habitat is Earth!

The evils that afflict humankind upon this Earth are not a scandal
solely for those who believe in a Creator. They are also a scandal for
those who believe that Nature cares for human beings.

Most of the atheists among my friends at Harvard years ago (and
elsewhere in academic departments of philosophy) were actually
rationalists, who believed that in the end, at bottom, reason and law
governed all things. They simply saw no reason for calling that abiding
rationality in things a gift from God, whom they could not see. It was
simply there, unexplained.

A few of them, however, were nihilists. They believed that "at
bottom" there was just one unexplained bottom after another unexplained
bottom "all the way down." Our existence is only a joke, a fluke, an
irrational flick of pure, unadulterated chance. They believed that their
superior intellects allowed them to cut through all the fraud, pretense,
and superstition in which others took comfort. They thought that even
the "rationalist" atheists were not smart enough to detect the absurdity
of their own position. An "unexplained" rationality is a non-rational
rationality. The rationalists were actually nihilists who couldn't yet
admit it.

To this accusation, the atheists who were rationalists replied
that they were merely being pragmatic, walking as far as the light of
rationality took them, and saw no need to throw themselves on the ground
in adolescent "existential anguish." They thought the nihilists went way
too far in romantic self-dramatization, and their admonition to them
was: "Grow up."

Modernism, however, which in my university years connoted
Nietzsche, nihilism, contempt for anything bourgois or orthodox, and all
the flowers of evil, has become the common language of the arts and
"culture." Although now under the banner of "post-modernism," the
invisible gas of nihilism seems to have seeped into every quarter. More
even than the universities, the media have become the carriers of
nihilism, even when nihilism is far from the intentions of the carrier.

Well, then, how does nihilism explain the ease with which Nature
threw 150,000 living, unsuspecting, terrified human victims in Asia to
their anonymous deaths?

The entire "nobility" of nihilism depends on the superiority of
intellect that allows the nihilist to see himself as smarter than those
who believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent Creator God. In
other words, the Jewish and Christian God. The whole emotional-moral
point of nihilism is to hold itself superior to Judaism and
Christianity. If everything else is absurd, religion must be too. That
is why, faced with a horrendous natural disaster, in which thousands of
innocent human beings die irrationally, for no reason, the rationalist
atheists and the nihilists alike blame God first. It is important for
them to do that.

They do not blame just any God. The God of the Maya and many other
religions of nature has always been known to be cruel, as Nature itself
is cruel, and heedless of human emotion, aspiration, and hope. Rather,
it is only the God of Judaism (learned of and spread round the world by
Christians) that they blame. No, perhaps more, they blame the God of
Christianity, for in Christ the world has been given an even more vivid
image of divine concern for the poor, the lowly, and the needy, and of
divine gentleness, friendship and love. They are blaming the God of the
Sermon on the Mount. That is the God that there is true joy in blaming.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Truly, the continuing presence of evil in the world — perhaps most
acutely when this evil is manifested in unconscious Nature, out of its
own laws and processes — is a great scandal to loving, believing
Christians. It is truly hard for them to understand how a kind and
gracious Providence can allow such terrible things to happen to human
beings. To so many scores of thousands of human beings. On such a vast
scale.

In some ways, it is easier to understand how individual human
beings can do horribly evil deeds. At least one can point to their free
will. Struggling to find plausible reasons, one recalls one's own
irrationalities and sins, murders one has read of in the local papers,
etc.

It is true that some evils are so unspeakable and unimaginable
that they defy all attempted comparisons to anything in anyone's
previous experience — the Holocaust, for example. How can a good God
possibly allow that horror to happen to (in a twofold sense) his own
people? But even these we attribute to human agency, however monstrous.
Whereas the dead that have suffered from a naked act of Nature seem
somehow to have been stricken by God's own unmediated action.

What can biblically informed believers reply to those who,
contemplating the massive destruction and death in today's Asia, blame
their God (a God in Whom those who do the blaming do not believe)?

Confronted with this demand — confronted with it, actually, quite
often in my lifetime — I think first of this: Since those who ask it do
not believe in God, the question is not what it seems to be. The real
point of the question is to get me to groan inwardly by agreeing that
the one who thinks he is my superior is correct, after all. The real
point is to get me to deny the reality of God.

The point is even a little more complex. My taunter does not want
me to deny the reality of God on the ground that the assertion of that
reality is absurd. Actually, my taunter holds that everything, at
bottom, is absurd. My taunter really wants to show me that I am like
him; and that I too am driven to join him in recognizing the absurd at
the bottom of all things. He wants to prove that he has been smarter all
along, and to watch me have to surrender as he has surrendered. He has
given up his faith in reason all the way down, and he wants me to do the
same.

My second thought is as follows. The Bible warns us often of the
confrontation with the absurd that each of us who believes in the
goodness of the Lord must face, and more than once in our lives. We see
all the time in the Bible that the just are made to suffer, while the
unjust live and laugh in plenty, heaping ridicule on the just. We read
of the horrid, unfathomable afflictions that God piles up on his
faithful servant, Job. Job refuses to say that in doing these things to
him God is acting justly or kindly; Job knows his own pain, and he
refuses to lie. He refuses to "prettify" God, or to cut God down to
human standards. He knows that God is no sentimental liberal.

And if Job is the type of "the suffering servant," whose
sufferings cannot be explained by his own deeds, and whose sufferings
are on the face of it horribly and inexcusably unjust, so also is the
Son of God, Jesus Christ, the sinless One, who in forewarning his
apostles of the sufferings he will endure on the cross alludes to Job
more than once.

WHO'S JUDGING WHOM?

Stand before the cross. Look at the body of this suffering servant
of God. Look, perhaps, with eyes opened by Mel Gibson's all but
unendurable The Passion. If this is what God did to His own Son —
His own being, with Whom He is one — then what hope is there that we
will be treated "nicely"? The God who does this is not "the God of
niceness." His scale of grandeur is far different from ours. One has no
sense of Him whatever if one does not feel inner trembling and vast
distance.

He is not a God made in our image. We are made as (very poor)
images of Him — images chiefly in the sense that we experience insight
and judgment, decision and love, and that we too have responsibilities.

This is the God who made the vastness of the Alps and the Rockies
and the Andes; who knows the silence of jungles no human has yet
penetrated; who made all the galaxies beyond our ken; who gave to Mozart
and Beethoven and Shakespeare and Milton and Dante and legions of others
great talents; who infused life into the eyes of every newborn, and love
into the hearts of all lovers; and imagined, created, and expressed love
for all the things that He made. He made all the powers of storms, and
all the immense force of earthquakes, and the roiling and tumultuous
churning of the oceans. He imagined all the beautiful melodies we have
ever heard, and more that we have not.

God is God.

God is our Judge.

We are not His judge.

The question is not, "Does God measure up to our (liberal,
compassionate, self-deceived) standards?" The question is, "Will we
learn — in silence and in awe at the far-beyond-human power of nature —
how great, on a far different scale from ours, is God's love?"

It would be the greatest and most obscene of illusions for a man,
any man, to imagine that he has greater love for a child mangled in the
oily, dark waters of the recent tsunami than the Creator of that child
has. It would be like Ivan Karamazov being unable to forgive God so long
as one single child anywhere went to bed at night crying in loneliness
and in pain. Who is Karamazov to think that his own love for that child
— a purely abstract, speculative, hard-case, counterexample love — is
greater than that of the child's Creator?

The tapestry on which God weaves human existence is not the
tapestry within the framework of time that we experience. As we do not
comprehend the power of nature (especially nowadays, when we live so far
removed from it, so protected from it), even more we do not begin to
comprehend the love and goodness of God.

The truth is, the sight and smell of awful human death is
sometimes more than we can take. Perhaps we should feel confidence in
the power of God's love, but we do not see it. All we feel is the night.
Our darkness is as keen as that of the unbeliever and the nihilist.

Yet in that darkness, we the believers alone (not the unbeliever
or the nihilist) feel betrayed by One whom we love. We alone feel
anguish because we cannot understand.

But it is not as if we had not often before bumped into the limits
of our understanding, and recognized nonetheless that there are
undeniable glimmerings of powers and presences we know not of. And, like
Job, we refuse to deny the power of the goodness and light which we do
see, their power to go out into the night in which we cannot now see.

It does seem that the Creator is not always kind, not even just,
within the bounded space that we experience. It does seem that the
Creator acts with undeniable cruelty. In our time, we have seen
unimaginable suffering. Like Job, we cannot deny what we see.

Neither can we deny the Light, which is what makes the absurd seem
absurd. Only in contrast to Light is the absurd absurd. Otherwise it is
only a brute matter of fact.

No less than the unbeliever or the nihilist does the devout Jew or
Christian inhabit the night. But only the believers continue in the
silence to utter the unseeing yes of our love. The yes that Ivan
Karamazov cannot say in the night Alyosha does say.

— Michael Novak's latest book is
The Universal Hunger for Liberty (Perseus, Basic), but he has
written extensively on the theme addressed above in Belief and Unbelief
and The Experience of Nothingness, as well as (with Jana Novak) Tell Me
Why, all of which are still in print and available through his website
at www.michaelnovak.net.